Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the brevity-is-the-soul-of... dept

We've got a big batch of short ones for you this week, with most of the best comments taking the form of tactically deployed one-or-two-liners. On the insightful side, the top comment comes from Tim Cushing's extremely popular post about the mouse that required an internet connection. Lots of people have compared that situation to DRM, even though it isn't really the same thing at all, which prompted JamesF to ask what this tells us about DRM itself:

Dear content industry. You've actually managed to make DRM mean "Anything the manufacturer does that screws the customer over". Are you getting the hint yet?

(I think the correct answer is that some got the hint a long time ago, while others would still ignore it even if disembodied fingers wrote it on their wall.)

In 1852, both parties sucked badly on the #1 civil liberties issue of the day, slavery. The difference then, was it was the #1 issue, period, of the day. Factions in both parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, had strong, vocal supporters, and both parties had bitter internal arguments on the issue. That year, the Whigs cracked and began to disband. By 1856, a new party, founded on this one issue, had risen; the Republicans.

Anti-slavery Democrats fled their party to join the Republicans; pro-slavery former-Whigs muddle about but eventually ended up as Democrats (because it's a two party system, so what else can you do?)

I wish my company could suffer "irreparable harm" and still carry a market cap of $553 billion.

But don't you see? If Motorola would just stop competing, it could be even higher!

For editor's choice, we'll head back over to our post about civil liberties in political platforms (or the lack thereof). One commenter suggested that your only choice is to vote for the lesser evil, but an anonymous response suggested a third option:

Why vote for the lesser evil?

VOTE CTHULHU!

And, finally, because I love a good Canada joke when it's even vaguely more creative than "igloos, um, mounties", we've got Michael on our post about a 9-year-old girl's football video being taken down for containing unlicensed music. A Canadian commenter noted that the revised video was geoblocked in Canada, and Michael diagnosed the problem:

i dunno about their other stuff, but logic-tech's good for it's low end stuff: relatively basic, low price, high quality. pretty much everyone else's equivalents are either crap or a lot more expensive.

dunno about fancy, high end, customisable 'far too many buttons to be reasonable' stuff, mind. never had much need for it, myself.